New ScotFlash Website now live.

The past couple of years have been the busiest in my 15 years of doing Flash/Web Front end Dev(hence no post’s on here since 2011). The past couple of months have been my quietest.

A couple of months ago one of my clients asked if I could look into a html5 solution that had been developed in Flash. Coming from a background of nothing but Flash for over 10 years I didn’t relish the thought of developing something in html that I had already developed in Flash. I do have HTML and CSS experience but I thought this would not be enough. Needless to say I took on the challenge.

My first port of call was jQuery. I’ve heard other developers speak highly of it. To say I was pleasantly surprised was an understatement!
Lightweight, Cross browser compatibility, very easy to understand and implement.
It didn’t take me very long to start porting my Flash code over. To my surprise 2 weeks later and I delivered a POC that mirrored what had been developed in Flash.

I’ve had some free time in between projects since then and using jQuery to develop the POC was an eye opener. I decided I would take what I learned from the POC and see if I could mirror my personal Flash site Innovativedesigns (just as a learning experience). If you where to believe the hype Flash is dying! So they say. So I thought I better start looking into HTML5 and it’s surrounding technologies.

My biggest concern was “Cross browser compatibility”. I’ve seen this thrown about so many times over the years that it acted as a deterrent to stay away from html development. I’ve had it easy not having to worry about this since Flash would play fine on just about any browser or media device that had the Flash plugin installed .

Starting off I would just develop on one browser(Chrome) and see how far I would get before things would not work, look or act as I intended. I even went as far as to name the dev folder “2014″ as I thought it would be at least 2014 before I would have something that would even closely resemble my Flash site.

Three weeks into development and making some serious ground with every headache that I encountered google and stackoverflow was there to guide me. Six weeks into development and finding myself pretty close to being finished I start testing across different browsers and media devices. The site has shown to perform flawlessly. Even on tablets and iPads.

I still have further functionality I would like to add to the site but I am extremely pleased with what I’ve accomplished in the 6 weeks.

One Response to New ScotFlash Website now live.

Nice information from a point of view of a flash developer…Looked at your new website, which works on jQuery now. Have you realised that scrolling some content in your windows is quite intensive? There aren’t any really big surfaces, but in small window it still eats ~20% CPU and ~45% GPU when scrolling on my quad core i7… Maybe you could optimise it better so it would work on average computers more fluently, but from this it seems that flash would perform here still significantly better … (not propagating flash headlessly)